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Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

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Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#91

Post by strken »

gregjor wrote: post #83
strken wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the interesting bit isn't the jargon, it's the parallel but separate paths of computer use. Changing an car's air filter is obviously different from driving. Flipping a circuit breaker is like flipping a switch, just for the whole house, and also it happens automatically if you anger the switch by plugging too much stuff in or dropping the toaster in the sink. Both of them make sense intuitively. Changing a .…

A non-programmer wouldn’t use anything we’d call a toolchain. They would use a WYSIWYG editor like Word, and still not understand formatting or how to print.

I'm happy to say Word, whatever version of PDF ULTRA DELUXE PRINTER 9000(TM) turns up first in search results, and Wix are at least analogous to a toolchain. It's three tools that they'd use in sequential steps, taking the output of each step and using it as an input to the next.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#92

Post by nicolas_t »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #23
nicolas_t wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of college grads don't know how to operate in a linux dev environment? That'd be an immediate no-hire from me.

Umm, most professional programmers probably don't know how to operate in a linux dev environment bro... That is also an extremely stupid requirement. You can be a good programmer (Especially as a junior) without knowing all the linux command line tools.

I haven't met a good professional programmer working in webdev who didn't know their way around linux. I've met plenty of bad programers who got into this field for money, didn't know how their way around unix, were barely able to do fizz buzz and would be better doing something else. I haven't hired them though. Not knowing one's way around linux is a sign of lack of curiosity and passion for the topic.

It's obviously different in some fields (like gamedev) where the code produced by the dev is not supposed to run in a linux environment.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#93

Post by mattvot »

AndrewPGameDev wrote: post #79

Slight tangent from the original post: I wish "normal" people were more tech-literate. I don't think they realize just how much of their autonomy they've given up by choosing to use Microsoft Products/Reddit/Twitter/Spotify/Facebook/TikTok/Apple Products/ etc. We're at a point where now the average person depends on several layers of technology that they can't even conceive of, and often the companies building that t…

> not understanding how technology works when it's so central to our everyday lives just seems baffling

I don’t know. I appreciate the sentiment and would also like more tech literacy, but there are lots of areas central to our lives and I think it’s unrealistic to expect a good understand across it all.

I think it’s on us to be able to adequately communicate and understand the needs of those that ask us for help.

Just as you would want a doctor to explain what your condition is in a way you would understand.

Having buildings to live in is pretty central to most of our lives too, and we have some knowledge and intuition of what looks safe and can be used, but most of us leave the engineering to someone more in the know.

Farming too, I rather people in the industry work on maximising yield to feed us all with tools made and tailored for them.

I think when people go to the quickest solutions for them in tech (i.e. Ms 365, Spotify, John Deere, ABC MRI Scanner etc), I’d rather have them focused on the details of their trade than learning how to use a terminal, jailbreak a tractor or replace a magnet in an MRI scanner.

Those that want to, great, but I think most don’t have the time or interest to take on that kind of deeper learning.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#94

Post by deafpolygon »

siva7 wrote: post #67
deafpolygon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's funny is I know some amount of owing to me being a JOAT (jack of all trades), so when they run into some issues and I'm able to debug it they wonder why I'm a sysadmin and get paid less than they do. Why ARE sysadmins like me paid less than developers? And I can't get hired as a dev because they see my CV and go, oh you're a sysadmin. I mean, try being a solo sysadmin of over 100+ production Linux servers with…

If you're wording your CV the way it screams sysadmin right in your face the only offers you get will be sysadmin. Try emphasizing your coding experience more

Correct, but it's also a common [false] view that sysadmins can't code. Even if I emphasize my limited) experience in code and leave out details about my sysadmin work, I get asked what did I do, etc. "Oh you're a sysadmin" and that's where the conversation ends.

But let's gloss over the fact that I can set-up the testing and production environment on my own along with the DB, schema, do the routing, proxy and everything in between. Then, back it all up.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#95

Post by dgb23 »

flamebreath447 wrote: post #31

I want to point out two additional observations. 1. There are a decent amount of software engineers or programmers whom literally aged at the perfect time to organically learn these tools that later became fundamental. If you even touched a computer from the 60s to the late nineties in a engineering aspect at all, you were bound to have worked in a terminal, worked on computers with a single core, worked on computers…

I like to surround myself with people where learning, teaching and curiosity are the norm.

I know the feeling of being looked down on. And vice versa I’ve been just as guilty of doing so when I was younger.

Both fundamentally sucks and doesn’t lead anywhere.

Managing our ego is hard, but even just the attempt goes a very long way.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#96

Post by nicolas_t »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #24
fcatalan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kind that went into the subject just because it pays well and are taught some kind of bimodal syllabus: Lots of heavy Math/CS stuff they forget after the test and then practical programming as defined by "industry", industry being the big consulting firms churning out Java.

This is exactly it. I'm involved with a lot of hiring for junior developers. It saddens me how many of them are trying to get into the field not because they're passionate for programming, interested in computers, or enjoy tinkering with digital tools. They're here because they're allured by big paychecks and "because everyone else at school is doing it." There are, of course, exceptions, and those are the junior dev…

Yup, and given that my entire career has been in startups environments, people who lack that passion and interest are usually not a good hire. Not knowing one's way around linux is a major red flag because it shows they lack curiosity for their chosen profession.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#97

Post by Dalewyn »

AndrewPGameDev wrote: post #79

Slight tangent from the original post: I wish "normal" people were more tech-literate. I don't think they realize just how much of their autonomy they've given up by choosing to use Microsoft Products/Reddit/Twitter/Spotify/Facebook/TikTok/Apple Products/ etc. We're at a point where now the average person depends on several layers of technology that they can't even conceive of, and often the companies building that t…

The reason is we only have so little time and yet so much to do.

For the vast majority of people, understanding technology is simply not worth their time. They have other, more important things to worry about.

You don't know nor care to understand how telephones and cars and electricity work. Nor how and where the food in the supermarket comes from. Water comes out of the faucet because faucets dispense water. You have more important things to worry about, like computer technology.

Much like those aforementioned things are merely a means to an end for you, so too is technology merely a means to an end for most people; their ends lie elsewhere.

Or to TL;DR: Life's short, ain't nobody got time for computer.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#98

Post by altacc »

This reads to me like very blinkered & elitist thinking. Repetition makes things easy, we are good at what we practice doing. A normal computer user rarely needs to do something that might be more efficient in markdown, command line, whatever, so their speed in doing that will be slower compared to a graphical interface.

Normal computer users want programs with dropdown menus and they are faster with those than we are when we have to look up a command or function that we rarely use. I know people who can filter & pivot a complex dataset quicker in Excel than I can in SQL.

I think it is safe to say that most programmers occasionally encounter something they need to Google for and dig through some stack overflow posts to find the syntax. That would be necessary almost constantly for a non-programmer and it's just not an efficient use of time.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#99

Post by achenet »

pdntspa wrote: post #17

We as an industry really need to be a whole lot more intolerant of ignorance. People learned how to drive, they can learn how to use a computer.

they learned to drive, not how a car works all the way down to the thermodynamics of the engine.

they learn to send WhatsApp messages with their iPhone, don't see why they'd learn how computers work all the way down to Maxwell's equations.

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#100

Post by fcatalan »

scoutt wrote: post #88
vbezhenar wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are three variants: #1. They are just stupid. #2. They don't care about work other than bare minimum to not get fired. They have better things in their life to care about. #3. They are as smart as you are, but they put their efforts elsewhere that you don't directly observe. May be they don't know how to operate Linux environment, but they spent days reading about DSP math and they can apply this knowledge to o…

You forgot one variant: they just don't like it. Like me. I use the command line all the day, compiling AOSP and kernels, and drivers, firmware, and all kind of related things for embedded. But I don't like it. To me, it feels archaic and counterintuitive (I'm autodidact). Same goes for command line editors or Vi, Vim, Emacs, etc. It's not 1985 anymore. Microsoft and Apple built an empire based on coherent (up to som…

It's not just concrete things like command line or linux or old crusty editors, it's about how they lack general computer savvy and flexible problem solving skills.

One example:

I had this guy, it was his second job, the previous one was about some Enterprise Java thing. Intelligent and hard working, and able to learn: we were exploring Erlang for some parts of the system and he was contributing within the month, with just a bit of hand-holding. But one day we get an urgent request for new functionality in the Java parts of the org, so I hand it to him. First task is getting some static data out of a few dusty html tables deep in the intranet and dumping it on a new table in the dev DB so we can start prototyping around it.

A couple of hours go past and I go check up on him. He's deep into some docs for an XML parser and ORM so he can parse the tables and get the data into the DB. He has already like 5 or 6 classes with all their getters and setters but he's not nearly halfway done.

I bring up the browser console, type $ to see if jQuery is loaded in the page, then come up with a one liner that spits the insert statements on the console (I had to google a couple of times, I'm not really a jQuery dude).

But then even that was a bit too flashy... he could just have coaxed the data into the database fiddling around with a spreadsheet and the DB GUI for a couple minutes.

But somehow his default and almost only mental model of interaction with data was overengineered Java, no matter how overkill it was for the task.

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